ClayArt

Don't know about Clayart but it seems that all the newsgroups are quite. Old technology?

Elaine

In message , D Kat writes

Hello Donna

I'm still here, also wondering where everybody else has gone? I'm not working at the moment for two reasons. First is that the weather here's too hot - 22degC. Second, we're moving my workroom out of the house to a space we've made at the back of the garage, so my kiln and all are in a state of chaos, to put things mildly. I'm trying to work on some acrylic paintings, but time always seem to be against me :-((

All the best Susie Isle of Arran, Scotland

Have you considered becoming an early morning person. just before dawn until 10 is a wonderful time to work. If only I could get my back side up and moving then... ;) Spring fever is making it hard for me to sit at the wheel for any time of worth. Instead I'm catching up on all the yard work which isn't a bad thing.

Donna

P.S. Should it not still be cold in Scotland? Global warming is certainly playing games with our weather (Long Island, NY. USA). It has felt like June for weeks and tomorrow for just one day it is back to what it should be. At least this year it hasn't fooled everything into blooming and then freezing it all.

So what is taking their place? I put up with the clayart format because of the people who post there. Viewing on the web for Yahoo and Google is simply painful. It is so easy to follow threads for this room in my newsreader and that has been around for decades now. It is a shame that this room is not utilized more and that it is open to spam - need a moderated version of this room that can be viewed with a newsreader IMO. Donna

Yes, I quite like my antiquated newsreader. It's a lot faster than reading the list that I read via Yahoo. I guess people like the fact that on blogs or proprietary discussions there's space for their picture or symbol - it's prettier. And, as you mention, a big thing is having a moderator. Recently r.c.p. has little need for a moderator as there's been little spam or flaming. Unfortunately getting a set-up for moderating and a person/committee of persons willing to do moderating over a long period of time is not easy.

Elaine

That is odd - in my newsreader is R.C.P is being flooded by spam from China about watches.

D>> So what is taking their place? I put up with the clayart format because >> of

I guess "flooded" is relative, but for me a few obvious spams per day is no big deal... I just hit "Ignore" and move on. And RCP is so quiet that even though these spams are a big percentage, they are still trivial. Other NGs that I participate in not only have more spam, they have more legitimate-but-ultimately-uninteresting posts that require time to check out.

And some NGs have flamers, which we thankfully don't have here. Flamers are the worst, since they are typically responding to real posts; you don't know they are only flames until you read them. (Even when you know that someone has a history of flaming, they may also provide good responses at times.)

However, only one public NG that I regularly read has a moderator. I have no idea what it was like before it became moderated, but I for one would rather have it unmoderated. The moderation step delays the posts substantially (nearly a day sometimes), so you find yourself answering questions that others have already answered, but that haven't appeared yet due to the moderation delay. If it's an answer that takes a while to compose, this can be a real time-waster.

I've been off Clayart for over a year now, so I may be out of touch. But as a listserv, I find it much more cumbersome to deal with than a newsgroup, moderated or not. If you get every post as a separate Email, you have to sort the Clayart from the spam... and there is a

*LOT* of spam, since the moderator insists that your real address be posted in the Web archives for the spambots to grab.

I solved this by getting the digest version, and setting up a separate account just for Clayart. Then there was only one real message to pick up each day, and the rest was spam that could be flushed. But digests are awkward to deal with, especially for a busy list like Clayart. It's harder to reply to a post (and not the whole digest), and at least on my mail reader there is no simple way to extract a single post to save... it's either the whole digest or nothing. I had to cut-and-paste the post to Notepad, and save it separately in a Clayart folder independent from the Email system.

Newsgroups also have the advantage that messages are threaded, so you can set an entire thread to Ignore. (I understand that some Email systems are able to do this, but not mine.)

All in all, I'll take an unmoderated NG over a listserv any day! I think the ideal would be for Clayart to convert to a NG. I tried to bring that up with Mel a couple of years ago, but he was opposed, and restricted in his options as well. The one redeeming feature of Email is that everybody has it and knows how to deal with it. The vast majority of people have never even heard of newsgroups, though that is changing somewhat with Google Groups... which has its own set of problems.

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v3.50 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, FREE Signal Generator Science with your sound card!

I guess since I have not been checking this room all that often it seems like there is far more Spam than there is. It is just vastly more recently than it has ever been. I much prefer the format here but it has become so quite that there is little reason to drop in.

Clayart continues to be not up and working. As I said, I really dislike the list format. If they could somehow change it so that it is not based on weekly divisions and keep threads together that would greatly improve it. I have come across very interesting threads that you can never find the beginnings of which greatly decreases the worth. I now get the email digest and read the list with a web browser - when I made the mistake of taking email messages it was disastrous. The search engine is awful on the list but google works somewhat on potter.org. I feel like an ingrate looking a gift horse in the mouth....

Donna